Pay no heed to the election of Donald Trump. Sure, it might have seemed like a shocking break from the elite consensus, but what Americans really wanted from Washington, even if they couldn’t find a way to show it in words or deeds, was a doubling down. Which is why 2020 brings hope in one word: Hickenlooper. And Kasich. So two words. But one electrifying joint independent bid.

According to Mike Allen at Axios, Colorado’s governor, Democrat John Hickenlooper, has been cozying up to Ohio’s governor, Republican John Kasich. Their staffs are friendly. They’re working together on health-care policy—a “blueprint for stabilizing health-insurance markets,” to quote Kasich. It sure looks like they are considering a joint ticket for 2020 as a challenge to Trump, with Kasich leading the ticket.

Kasich has shot down the speculation, telling Meet the Press that the unity ticket would be unpronounceable. But it is worth pondering the continued salience of the bipartisan dream that regularly bewitches Washington’s professional pundit class.

Hickenlooper is popular in Colorado, known for being swing-state-friendly in his politics, and Kasich is popular in Ohio, known mainly as the presidential candidate who kept losing primaries yet refused to leave. The building blocks of unity are arrayed in force. The men are taking health-care ideas from the “American Enterprise Institute on the right and the Center for American Progress on the left,” reports Allen. They’ve got a “jobs plan.” They’ve even got a message that is, according to Allen, “optimistic and hopeful.”

During the primaries, populists on the right, and some on the left, used the pejorative “uniparty” to characterize what they saw as a mostly undifferentiated Republican and Democratic establishment. But no one seemed willing to consider whether “uniparty” might be a good thing, reducing pesky choices. In a time of anger and strife, we should be happy that what unites our establishment is far greater than what divides it.

One of the more enduring ideas you see in politics is that of putting aside partisanship to get things done. It takes “common-sense solutions,” as the organization No Labels puts it. Or, as John Hickenlooper’s spokesperson has said, we’ll come together to “find solutions that move Colorado up.” Or, as John Kasich has written, “tough problems can be resolved if people work together.”

Now, if you agree on the ends, such as getting everyone good health care, then you can negotiate about means. But what if you’re not agreed on the ends? That’s where Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders proved to be unsporting, deviating from the normal range of policy aims, even policy aims on which Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton were in agreement. A Kasich and Hickenlooper ticket might finally put a stop to the madness.

First, on foreign policy, we know Kasich would reconnect us with the world. Under Obama, the United States bombed only seven countries in 2016, and our only use of force to change a regime was in Libya. John Kasich would get things moving again. He wants to “punch the Russians in the nose,” and, as he told an audience in Cleveland last summer, he supports arming the Ukrainians “as long as I breathe air.” Who among us goes to sleep feeling differently? As Americans confront our country’s many domestic problems, we’re consoled by the passion we share with John Kasich for adding weaponry to Kiev’s dispute with Moscow.

Second, on immigration, there are, to be sure, some differences of opinion. Some Americans want only 200,000 newcomers a year, others more than 2 million a year. Some favor blanket deportation, and some favor blanket amnesty. Some want to prioritize skills; others, family. But, as John Hickenlooper has said, “Let’s get the system fixed.” The problem is we’re getting ideological instead of leaving it to John Kasich. “I am trying to come up with the best way,” Kasich told a crowd last year. “It is called common sense.” Who needs to know more? Kasich’s got this.

Then there’s trade. While it might seem to millions of U.S. workers as if our trade deals caused their decently paid blue-collar jobs to dry up, they don’t see that the payoff is just around the corner. As John Hickenlooper has said, we need to do a better job “retraining them into the new economy.” Today’s 50-year-old welder at Carrier is tomorrow’s Ruby developer at Mixpanel. As for Kasich, he has avowed, “I’ve never been a total free trader,” so it’s with skepticism that he has supported every trade deal passed by Congress. As he understands, Americans deep down want these deals to keep getting passed, provided our leaders have the good courtesy to hem and haw.

Can it work? Let us enter the brain of Kasich and Hickenlooper and view its dreams. What we see is a Donald Trump presidency going from bad to worse. On the other side, Bernie Sanders gets the Democratic nomination. With Trump on one side and a socialist populist on the other, the independent lane opens up. Kasich-Hickenlooper zooms by both and wins. While much of the United States observes, nonplussed, denizens of Washington lose themselves to three days of orgiastic celebration.

We can’t abandon the dreams of the utopian uniparty ticket without at least staffing this dream White House. For Defense or State, we’d want someone who’s heartily bipartisan but who in intervention is also “muscular,” as they say in D.C. As luck would have it, there’s Joe Lieberman. For Treasury, we’d want someone who understands money well but has also argued on behalf of the little guy, noting that without America’s immigrants, “who takes care of the greens and the fairways on your golf course?” Let’s hope Mike Bloomberg is available. Jeb Bush has been lying low, but perhaps in a tribute to Donald Trump he should have the post of Energy secretary. The Department of Justice always bothers people on one side or another, so let’s give that to a Washington wise man who remains committed to both through thick and thin. Step up, David Gergen. That leaves so many uniters that still must be placed: Evan Bayh, Vernon Jordan, Nancy Jacobsen, John Hunstman, David Brooks.

But enough daydreaming. Let’s get moving. I have it on good authority that The Economist is prepared to write very favorably about this.